A known advantage of making structural members such as hollow tapered poles from filament-wound glass fibre reinforced plastic (GRP) is that the filaments can be orientated generally along the length of the structural member to thus impart stiffness and hence provide an optimum strength to weight ratio. It is also well known that optimum strength occurs when the filaments remain uncut or unbroken hut, in practice, it is necessary to provide joints where the structural member has to be connected to other elements, such as being fixed to the ground or by attaching fixing joints to the structural member above the ground by which other elements can be attached to it. This is very difficult to achieve without cutting or drilling into the GRP and hence the mechanical advantage of maintaining continuously round filaments under tension is lost at the points where they are cut for such purposes.